After graduating from culinary school and working at Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan, I took a job as a line cook at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant and working farm in upstate New York. It was there that I killed my first turkey. The smell of wet feathers lingered in my memory for weeks. For a while I couldn’t tell if it was in my head or still on my hands. Wet feathers smell like a wet dog—mildly sweet and warm, but not particularly pleasant. We killed five Broad Breasted Whites in the sheep meadow, cutting their windpipes in a matter of minutes. It was a requirement of the job, not a task I could avoid, even as part of me wanted to. We dunked the dead bodies in boiling water and plucked them. White feathers filled the air and floated in the sunlight. I thrust my hands deep into the bird’s cavity. It was still warm. I slid my hands up the inside of the breastbone and felt the windpipe and heart and gizzard and intestines and pulled them out in one handful. I severed the feet and the head and removed the yellow gland at its tail. I sliced open the gizzard and pulled out the sack of grain it had eaten that morning, the grain still whole. That day, I used every part of the animal, and was shown how to treat it with integrity from the field to the plate. The experience ignited a primal part of me that I had never recognized before. I felt like all of my meat should be taken the same way, in from the wild, where I knew the animal died in dignity, without the drawn-out torture of a feedlot.

From that day on, I resolved to get closer to my ingredients. In the same way that some wine connoisseurs seek out wines that convey terroir, or a sense of the unique environmental conditions in which the grapes were grown,I began to seek out foods that have the purest possible connection to the land, and impart a sense of place.And that’s how I found myself on a rainy dark afternoon, at the age of twenty-seven, walking into a rundown shooting range in Pearl River, New York that looked more like an excuse for retired townies to get together and chain smoke than anything else. I took a deep breath and made these men put out their cigarettes and teach me how to shoot. They were good humored as they answered my questions, telling me everything I wanted to know about weights and scopes and chokes, about pump action shotguns versus over and unders versus bolt action versus a bow and arrow. I asked questions that they had never asked themselves because to them, this is just the way things are done. This is how their father told them it was, and how their grandfather told their father it was. But no one had ever told me how it was. My only currency was genuine curiosity. Turns out, sometimes curiosity is all you need.

A few weeks later, I took a hunter safety course in upstate New York, the only woman seated among groups of meaty men with tattoos and tank tops, and excitable young boys with their solemn fathers by their side. Everyone in the room, from my newly retired townie friends to my tattoo bearing classmates, gave me the same look: a mix of amusement, alarm, and confused interest.

Yes, my foray into the society of hunters has landed me in some unusual places. And as far as foodie circles go, it’s not exactly glamorous. Yet, as I discovered on my first turkey hunt, there is something truly spectacular about hearing the woods awaken at dawn along the Mississippi Delta and waiting for the forest to become visible; the feeling of the turkey caller clenched between the roof of my mouth and my tongue; making the first call, the hopeless feeling of getting no response at all; trying again, still nothing… and then the rush of excitement when an old gobbler starts to answer in the still quiet of morning after I’ve spent what feels like an eternity crouched in the woods, waiting. I even loved the ribbing I got from my southern hunting companions when I said the turkey was “responding well,” and they corrected me: “He’s gobbling his ass off!” There were other lessons as well, in companionship, and patience, in the belief that it is the hunt itself that is the great thing, not the amount of game you take. When I left the woods empty-handed, all I could do was salute the ol’ gobbler for outsmarting me.

I’ve learned a great deal from the men who have taken me, camouflage-clad, deep into their woods and worlds to teach me the finer points of the hunt. In return, they grill me on the proper preparation of a duck liver, or venison loin or hog offal, and watch as I kneel on the forest floor and harvest the heart of a deer so that I can show them how to make use of every part of the animal.